What are the odds. No really, what are the odds?
(Imagine the near future, when GPT denounces citizens to the police for reading unapproved texts... Philip K Dick cross Orwell cross Ray Bradbury.)
So they already have all the data, but nobody is looking at it. But soon (or perhaps already) we'd have (the functional equivalent of) a conscious being paying 100% attention to your every act.
It's almost flattering!
We're there. It's outsourced to Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
"Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" - 1984
Who needs infrastructure, education, public health, etc. when your primary concern is spying on your own population? The STASI and Gestapo - and their clients - would have understood.
Reminds me of the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. They use AI drones to prevent criminals from reoffending by constant monitoring.
> The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of course, is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality loss in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the offer of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does is follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to deal with people who are simply violent.
Still, it's pretty easy to get a church to give you a Bible, I think the Gideons will send you one, so not the best choice to bootleg.